Saturday, May 14, 2005

A "Classic" at 30

It's hard to believe it was 30 years ago that Lou Reed launched his most enduring assault on the senses - and his most bald-faced "fuck you." Still an utterly enigmatic and unprecedented event in the history of modern music, Metal Machine Music exists in defiance of every notion of accepted logic and sanity. That an entire double album (clocking in at more than an hour in length) of nothing but processed feedback could be released on a major label in the mid-1970s is still an astonishing thing to consider; that the album was nearly released on RCA's classical label just adds to the delicious absurdity of it all.